Shigeru Miyamoto discusses his retirement in an interview

The 60 year old developer who brought us Mario, Zelda and Donkey Kong has been thinking about his retirement. But not in the short term; rather he’s been trying to prepare Nintendo for when he does retire at some point in the future.

In an interview with Gamespot, Shigeru Miyamoto says, “This year I’m past 60; I’m going to be turning 61 this year. So for me to not be thinking about retirement would be strange. But in fact, the number of projects I’m involved in–and the volume of my work–hasn’t changed at all.”

He continues, “Instead, what we’re doing internally is, on the assumption that there may someday be a time when I’m no longer there, and in order for the company to prepare for that, what I’m doing is pretending like I’m not working on half the projects that I would normally be working on to try to get the younger staff to be more involved.”

“And this actually has nothing to do with any kind of retirement planning or anything of that sort. It’s really more of simply the fact that people have a tendency, certainly when you’re in an organizational structure, they have a tendency to always look to the person that gives them direction. And really, for a long time I’ve been thinking that we need to try to break that structure down so that the individual producers that I’m working with are really taking responsibility for the projects that they’re working on.”

“And as I like to say, I try to duck out of the way, so that instead of them looking at me, they’re looking at the consumer and trying to develop their games with the consumer in mind rather than me in mind. So it’s really more of looking at this as sort of an opportunity to really try to help develop them and bring them up.”

So he’s not done just yet, but he knows there will be a time when he does leave. Fortunately, it looks like he’s trying to cultivate the younger talents at Nintendo. That says a lot about the man, Shigeru Miyamoto; he’s more interested in the continuation of Nintendo than just his own legacy.

If you want some entertainment, check out the original article on Gamespot for hilarious comment wars.